Setting GMAIL SMTP on WordPress – Easy Way

Wondering why the mail from your website ending up in junk/spam box instead of inbox? Well there are many reasons why emails end up in junk. You can learn about them from the links below. But in this post I am not going to write about why and how the genuine mail are marked as spam. This post will show you how to prevent your website mail being filtered as spam by Setting Gmail SMTP on WordPress .

You can follow the ideas from this post to use in other frameworks as well as the configuration and information needed are similar.

First of all, What is SMTP? SMTP is Simple Mail Transfer Protocol . It is a protocol used to send mail from one server to another. We are all familiar with emails and email accounts. There are lots of free email providers, some of the big bosses are GMAIL, OUTLOOK and YAHOO which we all know about. Among these GMAIL is considered as the secure and reliable among all others. Gmail is a product of Google among the other free services google provides for its users.

So what is Setting Gmail SMTP on WordPress and how does it works? Gmail SMTP is a method to use a gmail account on your website and send the mail from your website(contact form, notification etc). When we use gmail smtp on website, while sending mail, google account is accessed through SMTP and is used to send emails which you later can find in your sent box of gmail. Isn’t it quite fascinating? Obviously it is as you can check how many email are sent and to whom from your gmail account easily.

There are couple of things that you need to know before using the gmail SMTP. The information needed are :

Gmail Account and Password : You Gmail Account Credentials

SMTP Host : smtp.gmail.com

Port : 465

Encryption : SSL

Disable Google’s 2 – way verification

Allow Access to Low Secure apps

To use Gmail Account as SMTP, 2 way verification should be disabled as it will require extra things to connect to Gmail Account which is not supported by the SMTP plugins. Google account should be accessible by less secure app (website) .

Let’s start configuring it on WordPress. We are using WP Mail SMTP plugin. Install the plugin and activate it. You can find new option “Email” in Setting Section. Select Email from setting.

Fill the fields with your account information.

Save the changes you made by clicking Save Changes. To test whether your setting are working or not send a test email and check.

From this point, as you have set up your Gmail SMTP correctly all mail generating from your website will be send using the Gmail and the chances of ending mails to junk/spam are very very much lesser than using other mail agents.